DIAL: Digital Innovations Awesome List (December)

At Centro, we know that keeping up with the trade pubs and latest trends can be tough and time consuming. To make that easier, we’ve compiled all the articles, reports, and other bits of awesomeness you may have missed, but should definitely read. Enjoy our latest list below!

Trials and Tribulations For Brands In-Housing Their Programmatic Advertising
More and more advertisers are bringing programmatic in-house, and when you combine that with a brand team’s ability to manage their own first-party data, there’s promise of more efficiencies and transparency. Some of the challenges these teams face range from hiring and training, vetting new partners, and retooling how they’re working with existing, longstanding partners.

Forrester Report: Predictions 2018, A Year of Reckoning
As the economy grows and signs of the marketplace as a whole changing, Forrester’s 2018 predictions describe how companies looking to evolve into modern marketers will need to take aggressive action with regards to customer experience and new technologies. Or else marketers will be faced with a year of reckoning as advertising budgets remain flat.

The Duopoly Will Capture Almost All Advertising Growth In 2018
The latest report out of Magna Global puts 84% of current share of global digital ad investment with the big two: Google and Facebook. If that seems like an incredible data point, Zenith also released their latest numbers and claim both platforms accounted for 96% of growth in global digital ad spend in 2017. Could next year be the year that Amazon steps up in a big way to be the challenger? It won’t be from new dollars coming from CPG, auto, telecom, or retail sectors, because each will continue to cut or keep their overall ad spend flat in 2018, while advertisers will look to shift investment into programmatic buys.

LUMA’s State of Digital Marketing at DMS West 17
Take a look at Luma Partners’ yearly report, which contains market updates with continued consolidation via M&A activity, ad tech ecosystem considerations regarding the opportunity beyond the duopoly, and industry trends (and demands) towards more integrated tech platforms.

Publishers See a Slow Shift, Not Rush, To First-Price Programmatic Ad Auctions
Programmatic media is seeing a shift from second-priced auctions to first-priced auctions as buyers look to gain a better understanding of the true value of an impression, and publishers are able to offer more transparency – and often better win rates.

5 Ways to Protect Against the Ad Fraud Surge in Q4
Ad fraud levels will reach their peak during the holiday season, and White Ops has some good ideas on how to ensure that additional investment does not get stolen. Tips range from increased transparency and accountability to making sure targeting parameters are set up to deliver human, non-bot traffic.

Mobile Ad Trends: Ad Fraud Tops Transparency Concerns
For a channel that is seen as more complicated that desktop, marketers identified ad fraud as their top concern within mobile programmatic, followed closely by viewability, and targeting.

15 Things You Should Know About Location Based Advertising
Fifteen members of the Forbes Agency Council offered key considerations all brands should know about location-based advertising before they get started, including some tips you probably already know (it can be highly personalized and measurable) and some to start thinking about (consider context and intent).

Apple’s New Operating System Will Kill the Cookie
Apple's latest software, iOS 11, features "intelligent tracking prevention," or ITP for short. ITP blocks the use of third-party data after 24 hours, changing the way advertisers can use cookies. What does this mean for consumers and, more importantly, for marketers and technology providers?

5 Key Questions to Ask an ACR Wielding Vendor
Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) data from smart TVs can be confusing for many advertisers and marketers, as they’re not quite sure where the data comes from, how reliable it is, how it’s gathered or how representative it is of the viewing audience. What are the key questions to ask (and get answered) before working with the dozens of companies selling products that make use of ACR?

December’s DIAL is also available as a PDF. Download it here.